House of Saddam
BBC 2
The Money Programme: Who’s Buying Up Britain?
BBC 2
IT HAD to happen: the story of Saddam Hussein and his power-mad family retold as The Godfather. You could argue that these people could equally have resurfaced dressed in Roman togas in a Middle Eastern I, Claudius, in doublet and hose in Richard III or Macbeth, or in an episode of that vintage television drama The Borgias. But the Mafia now wins hands down in the dubious glamour stakes and, as soon as you heard the recycled movie theme over the trailer for House of Saddam, it was clear that Saddam the mob boss was on his way.
Igal Naor was perfect casting for this slick interpretation – his Saddam bull-headed, overbearing and yet vulnerable and faintly absurd beneath the bullet belts and bluster. The despot’s classic abused childhood was hinted at: wicked stepfather, rejection and abuse from his sadistic half-siblings. It was this branch of the toxic family tree which was first in line for Saddam’s revenge once he had seized power from a weakened president and seen his string-pulling mother safely expire. One by one, every politician and military bigwig who even vaguely threatened him was bumped off or run out of town. In one early scene set at his daughter’s birthday party, you half expected to see someone jump out of the cake and spray the room with machine-gun fire.
With many episodes from Saddam’s life, fiction has a hard time to catch up with the gobsmacking facts. For instance, the famous scene where supposed traitors were suddenly named at a meeting and led out to their deaths was never going to match the horror of the (carefully filmed) reality. But Alex Holmes and Steven Butchard’s script gave Saddam’s actions some political clarity and twisted logic often lost in the jingoistic lather of news reports we watched before and after the Iraq war. It also flattered him by giving him a gangster’s code of honour. When his nut-job son Uday (an excellent Philip Arditti) murders for fun, he screams into the boy’s face: “You think violence is a pastime? It’s a tool!” Was this really how it was? Is filtering Saddam Hussein through Marlon Brando the only way we can begin to fathom him? His story is one where you really are reduced to muttering: you couldn’t make it up.
If you were still feeling too upbeat and cheery after watching the Saddam show, The Money Programme: Who’s Buying Up Britain? provided something else to worry about. Here we learned that our proud island is being bought up by richer European, Middle and Far Eastern nations, looking for ways to spend the excess cash in their sovereign wealth funds.
The deal they are offering to our credit-crunched banks and businesses seems to be: take our cash and we’ll move your factory back to our place (Cadburys factory moves to Poland); switch off your energy supply if we fancy it (Russia bids for British Gas); muck about with your economy (Dubai owns 20 per cent of our Stock Exchange) and lean on your politicians if, for example, they say nasty things about our human rights record.
Globalisation was supposedly invented to serve us; now it seems to be a god, we exist only to placate it. Or is that just paranoia? As Saddam might well have said: you can’t be too careful.
Helen Chappell
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